There is a wide variety of digital communication systems, some presently in existence, and some still under development. Digital communication systems include time-division multiple access (TDMA) systems, such as cellular radio telephone systems that comply with the Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) telecommunication standard and its enhancements like GSM/EDGE, and Code-Division Multiple Access (CDMA) systems, such as cellular radio telephone systems that comply with the IS-95, cdma2000, and Wideband CDMA (WCDMA) telecommunication standards. Digital communication systems also include “blended” TDMA and CDMA systems, such as cellular radio telephone systems that comply with the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) standard, which specifies a third generation (3G) mobile system being developed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) within the International Telecommunication Union's (ITU's) IMT-2000 framework. The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) promulgates the UMTS standard. High Speed Downlink Packet-data Access (HSDPA) is an evolution of WCDMA specified in the Release 5 version of the 3GPP WCDMA specification. The 3GPP has begun considering the next major step or evolution of the 3G standard (sometimes called Super 3G—“S3G”) to ensure the long-term competitiveness of 3G.
Other types of digital communication systems allow equipment to collaborate with one another by means of wireless networks. Examples include Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) and Bluetooth equipment.
One thing that these different systems have in common is the need to maintain accurate timing. In modern radio transceivers (e.g., WCDMA, GSM and S3G phones and WLAN and Bluetooth equipment), two different clocks are used: a system clock (SC) and a real-time clock (RTC). The SC is usually a high frequency clock, running at several MHz, and generated by a highly stable oscillator, often applying a temperature-controlled crystal. The SC acts as the reference and is the frequency source for all radio related operations, such as radio frequency (RF) carrier synthesis. The crystals used for the SC have an accuracy on the order of 20 parts per million (ppm). However, for cellular terminals, this accuracy is improved by locking the SC to the downlink signals transmitted by the mobile network base stations. The SC is tuned to the downlink signals and therefore inherits the better stability of the clock reference used in the base station, which is about 0.5 ppm.
The SC's stability is obtained at the expense of electrical current consumption. To run the SC, several of milliAmperes (mA) are required. In particular, the SC requires too much current when the transceiver is in idle mode or in a low-power mode in which it sleeps most of the time. Therefore, the SC is turned off during the sleep states. In order to preserve timing during such sleep states, each modern transceiver also includes a non-reference clock, such as a low-power oscillator (LPO) or real-time clock (RTC) which runs at a much lower level of current consumption (several tens to hundreds of micro Amperes). The RTC usually runs at a much lower frequency than the SC, typically several kHz.
The RTC is used for several timing operations in the cellular terminal. It controls the sleep periods, and determines such things as when the terminal has to wake up to monitor the paging control channel or scan other broadcast control channels. The RTC also determines for how long uplink synchronization with the network can be maintained. Uplink synchronization is critical in time slotted systems, (i.e., systems that have a TDMA component, such as GSM and the newly developed Long Term Evolution (LTE) for 3G systems (S3G)). Due to the unknown round-trip propagation delay between the terminal and the base station, timing advance (TA) control messages need to be sent to the terminal in order to align the receive timing of its uplink transmissions with the timing of other uplink transmissions. Clock drift is a general cause for uplink timing mismatch, and requires the terminal to send uplink bursts frequently so that the base station can measure the timing misalignment and suitably command the terminal to adjust its timing by way of the TA message.
The inherent stability of the RTC is very poor, typically from 50 to 100 ppm. However, its stability is improved by repeated calibrations. The SC is used as a stable reference during the calibration. Once the RTC is calibrated, it has a level of stability close to the stability of the SC. In between calibration events, the stability remains within a few ppm.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,124,764 describes a calibration method that exploits the periodic paging wake-up times. In particular, the LPO output signal is monitored during a number of monitoring windows M. These windows preferably correspond to the wake-up periods in the standby mode of the host system that the LPO is part of. During wake-up periods, other activities such as page scanning, for example, may take place. The results of the monitoring process are accumulated. Based on the accumulated result derived from M monitoring windows, a decision for the correction scheme is determined for the next period encompassing another M monitoring windows.
Conventional calibration techniques have a problem in that they require quite a long calibration time. During the calibration, the SC has to run and this causes a high level of current consumption to be experienced. In order to limit the power consumption, the calibration duty cycle is kept low. However, this means that there is quite a long time between consecutive calibration updates. During this time, the RTC may drift too far away. Since the RTC controls the uplink timing, this drift will require uplink bursts to be sent to the base station frequently to support the TA procedure. The terminal expends power when it sends an uplink burst, and this reduces the terminal standby time. Furthermore, all of these uplink bursts increase overhead in the network.